PHONE BOOTH

Director:
Joel Schumacher

A cocky NY publicist picks up a
ringing public phone, and is told that if he hangs up, he'll die.

Phone
Booth is a slick thriller that immediately grabs you by the scruff of
the neck, and doesn't let go for the next seventy-two minutes. Joel
Scumacher invests the film with film with prodigious energy, making the
film work like a well-oiled machine. The script develops its lean,
unlikely premise carefully and, although there are a few clunky moments,
the story unfolds naturally. The film isn't long enough to present its
supporting characters in any depth, so instead it wisely focuses almost
exclusively on its protagonist, Stu Shepard, an obnoxious Bronx publicist.
The whole film revolves around Stu, a role which demanded - and received -
an outstanding performance, from Daredevil's
Colin Farrell. It's worth noting here that it was Schumacher who gave
Farrell the role that propelled him on the way to stardom, in his 2000
movie Tigerland.

Fox's
Region 2 DVD offers the film in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, with
anamorphic enhancement, presented over both layers of a dual-layer disc.
The Region 1 disc offers a choice of letterboxed and pan-and-scan versions
(on either side of a dual-sided, single layer disc). It's easy to see how
the film would be destroyed with half the frame cropped. It was shot in
Panavision format, and Schumacher makes great use of his wide canvas,
including numerous shots which feature split-screen action to show several
things happening simultaneously, or to convey flashbacks, or to show more
than one side of a phone conversation. The transfer is generally fine,
although the colours often seem conceptually drab (perhaps accurately
reflecting the quality of light in New York). Contrast levels are a little
inconsistent, and there are frequent signs of excessive edge-enhancement,
but there are no obvious encoding artefacts. The average bitrate is a
respectable 5.96Mb/s.

The
Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (at 448kbps) is not especially adventurous or
innovative, but is cleanly-recorded, and offers a good sense of ambience.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the mix is the use of directional
dialogue (i.e: dialogue which isn't locked to the centre channel), for the
scenes where split screen is used. It's also interesting to note that the
"the caller"'s voice is unfiltered. Conventionally, a voice on
the other end of a phone is altered to suggest the limited dynamic
range offered by the earpiece. Here the voice appears as a phantom
presence in the phone booth alongside Stu. It's an interesting directorial
choice, but one which isn't entirely successful. English subtitles are
provided for the film, the commentary, and the featurette.

The
film is supported by a lacklustre, half-hearted commentary track by
Schumacher, which was recorded before the film received its long-delayed
theatrical release. A lot of questions go unanswered, and, despite the
brief running time, he runs out of steam towards the end. There's also a
chunk where Schumacher stops speaking, so that the viewer "can have
this little moment", which is a particular annoyance. Another bugbear
is that the commentary ends shortly after the end credits start to roll.
Although silence is preferable to the all-too common practice of inanely
name-checking people as their names appear on-screen, the end credits
would seem to provide the ideal opportunity for the director to summarise
his feelings about the film. Finishing a commentary four minutes before
the film ends makes it seem like it was a chore.

The
disc makes up for the commentary track with The Making of Phone Booth,
a rewarding twenty-eight minute documentary that offers a good sense of
the movie's breakneck filming schedule. A normal shooting schedule would
be about forty days: Phone Booth was shot in twelve. Even though
the film is quite short, there are so many split-screen shots that the
production probably shot as much material as a full-length movie. To
complicate matters it was shot on location, in winter, meaning that the
natural light would begin to disappear at 4pm. Shooting so quickly made
enormous demands of Farrell, who would routinely have to learn and deliver
twelve to fourteen pages of dialogue a day. Schumacher is the featurette's
main contributor, but, as if to acknowledge the Herculean efforts of the
entire crew, there are also contributions from several people you rarely
hear from, including the on-set stills photographer and the second second
assistant director (whose role, it seems, is to prep the background
extras). The last third of the featurette is devoted to the filming of the
film's pivotal confession scene, which, according to the commentary, was
shot in one take. The

featurette also offers a good look at the
story's antagonist, who is mainly seen in the film in oblique, distorted
shots.

The
disc opens with trailers for Antwone Fisher, X-Men 2 (the
relatively rare "Coming 2003" teaser trailer, which doesn't
feature any footage from the film itself), and In America. These
can be fast-forwarded through, or skipped entirely using the Menu option.

Unless
explicitly stated, DVD screen captures used in the reviews are for illustrative
purposes only, and are not intended to be accurate representations of the DVD
image. While
screen captures are generally in their correct aspect ratio, there will often
have been changes made to the resolution, contrast, hue and sharpness, to
optimise them for web display.